week of 7/10/02
 
 
 

Little War — stickball heritage continues to play on
By George Ellison

Back in the mid-1980s I was honored to be invited by members of the Eastern Band of Cherokees to attend the first joint council of the Eastern Band and the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma since the removal era of the late 1830s. This council was held at Red Clay, Tenn., near Chattanooga.

At that time I was active as a volunteer for the Cherokee Challenge Program, a youth-oriented endeavor involving outdoor activities that taught community involvement and traditional values. The program had been asked by Chief Robert Youngdeer to run the symbolic reunion torches from Cherokee to Red Clay via U.S. 19 and 64, a distance of many miles that took two days. The young Cherokees, numbering 10 or so, took turns running the torch in legs ranging from one to five miles. We stayed in a Forest Service campground just inside Tennessee the first night and on the grounds of a white family located near Red Clay the second.

I was assigned the job of camp cook; that is, I would go ahead and purchase supplies and then cook supper and breakfast each day. I like to cook, which is no doubt why I was invited, but doing so for a horde of young people who have been running all day and their adult leaders was an undertaking.

Watching the young runners bearing torches come into the Red Clay ceremonial grounds that day was a moving experience. There were few dry eyes among the assembled throng of eastern and western Cherokees.

It was at this event that I first saw and heard Wilma Mankiller, then vice chief of the Cherokee Nation. Given her presence and commitment, it wasn’t difficult to realize that in time she would become their principal chief. The other great memory I have of that time was seeing my first Cherokee ball game (stickball), upon which lacrosse is based and sometimes called “Little War.”

The Cherokee elders had the wisdom not to pit Eastern Band and Oklahoma Nation teams against one another. After all, this was a long-delayed family gathering. The game was, as I recall, billed as an “exhibition” between two Eastern Band communities and probably involved Big Cove. The term “exhibition” was scarcely adequate. William Lossiah, one of our runners, was at that time a very good high school football player at 6-2 or so and 185 pounds. But he was an exceptional stickball player, roaming the field and wreaking mayhem like Achilles at war. There were also mature men, some of them well into their 40s, taking part. You could tell right away that these fellows, young and old, were fairly serious about stickball.

Like most of you reading this, I’ve experienced or observed in one way or another the more grueling sports played in this country: hockey, football, wrestling, boxing, and so on. But the near-violent mayhem of that Cherokee ball game was the first and only event that has ever turned my stomach; that is, I was a bit nauseous for a few moments. It appeared to my unschooled eyes that the players could, with a running start, hit anybody at any time with just about anything.

I asked a Cherokee man standing alongside me, “What are the rules?”

“Can’t touch the ball with your hands,” he replied.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” he replied.

In The Southeastern Indians (University of Tennessee Press, 1976), Charles Hudson notes that “The ball game was played by most of the Indians in eastern North America. All the Southeastern Indians played it, with the possible exception of the Caddos and some of the Florida Indians. Lacrosse, the national game of Canada, is an adaptation of the game as it was played by the Algonkian Indians in northern North America, where it was played with one ball stick. The Iroquois, the Dakotas, and Indians around the Great Lakes also played it with one stick, but the Southeastern Indians generally played with two. These ball sticks were two by two and one-half feet long and were made out of a piece of hickory or pecan wood, bent into a loop at one end to form a kind of spoonlike racket. The loop was laced across with deerskin, squirrel skin, or vegetable fiber. The Cherokees sometimes twisted bat whiskers in the string and tied feathers from purple martins and crested flycatchers to their ball sticks; this was believed to make their movements in the game swift, accurate, and deceptive to the opposing side ... The balls used in the game were made of deerskin stuffed tightly with deer or gray squirrel hair. The game was played on a cleared stretch of river bottom land, and each end of the field — anywhere from 500 to 100 yards long — was marked by a goal consisting of two poles driven in the ground ... The object of the game was to throw the ball between the two poles or to strike one of the poles with the ball. Either accomplishment scored one point. Among the Cherokees, the first team to score twelve points won the game.”

The most substantial description of traditional Cherokee stickball is provided by James Mooney, the anthropologist who lived in Big Cove among the Eastern Band Cherokees in the late 1880s. His account was published as

“The Cherokee Ball Play” in The American Anthropologist (vol. 3, old series) in April 1890. Here are some of Mooney’s observations:

“The numerous localities in the Southern States bearing the name of Ball Flat, Ball Ground, and Ball Play bear witness to the fondness of the Indian for the play ... To further incite them — the players — to strain every nerve for victory, two settlements, or sometimes two rival tribes, were always pitted against each other, and guns, blankets, horses — everything the Indian had or valued — were staked upon the result. The prayers and ceremonies of the shamans, the speeches of the old men, and the songs of the dancers were all alike calculated to stimulate to the highest pitch the courage and endurance of the contestants ... In addition to the athletic training, which begins two or three weeks before the regular game, each player is put under a strict ‘gaktunta,’ or taboo, during the same period. He must not eat the flesh of a rabbit (of which the Indians generally are very fond) because the rabbit is a timid animal, easily alarmed and liable to lose its wits when pursued by the hunter ... Above all, he must not touch a woman, and the player who should violate this regulation would expose himself to the summary vengeance of his fellows. This last taboo continues also for seven days after the game ... They are also “scratched” on their naked bodies (and) the player also marks his body in various patterns with paint or charcoal. The charcoal is taken from the dance fire, and whenever possible is procured by burning the wood of a tree which has been struck by lightning, such wood being regarded as peculiarly sacred and endowed with mysterious properties.

“It is a very exciting game as well as a very rough one, and in its general features is a combination of baseball, football, and the old-fashioned shinny hockey. Almost everything short of murder is allowable in the game, and both parties sometimes go into the contest with the deliberate purpose of crippling or otherwise disabling the best players on the opposing side. Serious accidents are common. In the last game which I witnessed, one man was seized around the waist by a powerfully built adversary, raised up in the air and hurled down upon the ground with such force as to break his collar-bone. His friends pulled him out to one side and the game went on.”

George Ellison is a writer who lives in Bryson City. He wrote the biographical introductions for the reissues of two Appalachian classics: Horace Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders and James Mooney’s History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokees. Readers can contact him at P.O. Box 1262, Bryson City, N.C. 28713, or at ellisongeorge@cs.com